WHY I AM NOT NOT A MAXIMALIST

Why Bitcoin makes Banks obsolete, and why that's a good thing.

Hey Folks,

As you may be aware, the Bitcoin halving will be this month. I’m hoping that it will be happen on 4/20. If it does, I’m going to take that as a sign.

For years, I have been a quasi-Bitcoin maximalist, for the simple reason that I think that it is superior in every conceivable way to fiat currency, which Bitcoin renders obsolete.

I suspect that Bitcoin was created by someone who understood what a scam central banking is and took Buckminster Fuller’s famous words to heart.

You know the one:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Before getting too excited about Bitcoin, one must be clear which problem it solves. It may be magical internet money, but it’s still money. It does not solve the problem of some people being extremely rich and others being extremely poor. But it does make banks and fiat currencies obsolete.

Given that all wars are funded by banks, Bitcoin would severely constrain the ability of governments to wage wars, which are usually fought largely because they are tremendously lucrative for bankers.

WHAT IS MAXIMALISM?

I should probably define what I mean by maximalist, because some people think it refers to Bitcoiners who think that their favourite crypto is the only one that matters and that all others are shitcoins.

By that definition, I’m not a maximalist. There’s also Monero.

Here’s how I would define the term:

1. Someone who believes that Bitcoin will replace the U.S. Dollar as the world’s primary reserve currency

2. Someone who thinks that would be a good thing

By the first definition, I don’t quite qualify, because I’m honestly not sure. It seems way more very possible, even probably, but I don’t think it’s the only possibility.

One of the biggest questions nowadays is whether the global supply chain can survive the collapse of U.S. Dollar hegemony. I wouldn’t bet on it. We may be looking at a new era of deglobalization, in which the global economy breaks down into more regional blocs.

Presumably, this will make fossil fuels less evenly available, which may lead to deindustrialization in certain parts of the world.

That said, if there is a collapse of industrial civilization, it will not occur in a uniform way, so I wouldn’t count on digital technology disappearing anytime soon. I think Bitcoin will last as long as the internet does. But I’m ambivalent about the internet. I’m against globalization. I’m for bioregionalization.

As for the secondary definition, you can bet your ass I think it would be a good thing if Bitcoin replaces the U.S. Dollar as the world’s reserve currency. I don’t think that anyone who has the slightest understand of how the global banking system works could be against that.

So am I a Maximalist? Yeah, kind of. I’m definitely not not a maximalist.

BITCOIN MAKES FIAT CURRENCY OBSOLETE

I know that I have some crypto-haters amongst my readers, so I’m treading carefully, but I consider this an indisputable fact: Bitcoin is superior to fiat currency.

Why? Well, there’s honestly a lot of reasons, but let’s start with this: in order for a monetary system to function, there has to be a limited supply of money. Who determines the limits of the supply of money? Obviously, the issuer of that currency. In other words, central banks.

It’s pretty hilarious that people are upset about the possibility of Central Bank Digital Currencies, because that’s what we’ve got now.

What do you think the U.S. Dollar is?

There’s no such thing as an unregulated bank

Right-wing politicians sometimes like to talk about bank deregulation, but obviously no bank could ever allowed to be completely unregulated. If banks were allowed to print as much money as they wanted to, they would.

If one bank started doing this, others would follow suit, starting a race to the bottom that would cause runaway inflation and a currency crash. There’s no such thing as an unregulated bank. Given that banks limit the supply of money, there’s no such thing as money without a state.

Or at least this used to be true. Bitcoin has made stateless money possible, which is the reason that so many anarchists are so stoked about it.

BANKING DEPENDS ON CARTELIZATION

In economic terms, a cartel is an agreement amongst producers to fix prices.

For a capitalist, it is the next best thing to a monopoly. Monopolies don’t work in the long term, which is why communist countries always fail.

If you want to understand what a cartel is, don’t think of Mexican drug cartels. Think of OPEC.

OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, uses the combined clout of its members to manipulate the price of oil. None of its member states, even Saudi Arabia, has the power to do this alone, but if they work together, they can manipulate the global market to suit their interests.

WHY DO CARTELS EXIST?

Perhaps the best way to think of a cartel is a agreement amongst competitors not to undercut each other. If competitors undercut each other by offering lower and lower prices, this drives prices down, starting a “race to the bottom”. This drives down profits.

Because businesses exist to make money, this is bad for everyone. Sometimes, a dominant player will make a “boss move” and deliberately start a race to the bottom to drive their competitors out of business, but this is risky. Often, competitors will decide it’s not in their best interests to try such a strategy

Oil is far from the only industry where this happens, by the way. The entire diamond industry is controlled by a single cartel. In Canada, the biggest grocery store chains got caught fixing prices, meaning that the grocery industry in Canada is arguably controlled by a single cartel.

Generally, cartelization leads to higher prices, which is bad for consumers. But cutthroat competition is arguably worse. I would argue that not all cartels are bad. For instance, there is an agreement amongst stilt-walkers in Toronto not to undercut each other. I suspect medieval trade guilds worked on similar principles. I would prefer cartels to monopolies or duopolies, which would likely result from cutthroat competition in many industries.

Also, if “Mexican drug cartels” are cartels, then why are there so many of them?

BANKING IS A CARTEL-CONTROLLED INDUSTRY

So if a cartel is an agreement amongst competitors to fix prices, what does that mean in the banking sector? Do banks control the price of money? What does that even mean?

This is a tricky question, because generally the price of goods and services is measured in money. But you can’t calculate the price of money in monetary terms. You can’t measure a yardstick with itself.

Let me say that again, because this is really key:

YOU CAN’T MEASURE A YARDSTICK WITH ITSELF

This is really why the world has gotten so crazy since 2008. The U.S. Dollar is still the global reserve currency, meaning that the value of other currencies is measured in dollars.

Do you see the problem? Imagine you have a yardstick and you’re used to measuring everything in yards. Then you become aware that you’ve never measured the yardstick itself. Maybe it’s not 91.44 centimeters. Maybe it’s 100 centimeters. Maybe it’s 80 centimeters. If you’ve been assuming that it’s 91.44 centimers, that means that all of your calculations might be inaccurate.

In reality, the situation is even worse than that example, because the truth is that the yardstick has actually been growing like Pinocchio’s nose. But at the same time as it’s been getting longer and longer, it’s also been getting thinner and thinner. It’s been getting so thin, in fact, that it seems like it will inevitability shatter, at which point you will have no way to measure anything.

That’s pretty much the situation. It’s more complicated than that, of course, but let’s start with that.

WHAT IS THE PRICE OF MONEY? HOW MUCH DOES MONEY COST?

Have you ever asked yourself what how money costs? Or, to ask the same question in a different way, what is the price of money?

The question might seem non-sensical, so let’s define terms.

According to the American Heritage dictionary, the definition of the word “price” is:

1. The amount as of money or goods, asked for or given in exchange for something else.

2. The cost at which something is obtained.

   "believes that the price of success is hard work."

3. The cost of bribing someone.

   "maintained that every person has a price."

So price is nearly synonymous with cost. What’s the definition of cost?

1. An amount paid or required in payment for a purchase; a price.

2. The expenditure of something, such as time or labor, necessary for the attainment of a goal.

3. Charges incurred in bringing litigation, including court fees and charges that may be payable by the losing party, but usually not including attorneys' fees.

Okay, so this confirms that the two terms are basically synonyms, but it does helpfully mention “the expenditure of something, such as time or labour, necessary for the attainment of a goal”. I can work with that.

IS TIME MONEY?

We are all familiar with the saying “time is money”. But is it true? What is time? As the great Canadian anarchist George Woodcock noted in his classic essay The Tyranny of the Clock, human societies have by no means always had the same notion of time, and class relations have changed considerably as different methods of time-keeping have evolved.

As David Graeber has noted, the idea of free people selling their time is a relatively recent one, and may be tracked back to ancient times, when slaveowners would rent out their slaves. Medieval artisans didn’t sell their time. Neither did serfs. Selling one’s time is a weird idea if you actually take the time to think about it. You’re practically subdividing your life and selling it piecemeal.

That’s only way to look at it, though. One could see value as a measure of time, as per the definition above, if one is referring to natural processes.

After all, if you plant crops, you then have to wait for them to grow. Arguably, a harvest is the product of human labour combined with natural forces, which take time.

I propose that the the term time is being used here to represent the value that natural forces produce. Nature produces value by storing sunlight over time. If time is money, then money is stored sunlight. Isn’t that what gold is?

If bandits or tax collectors then appropriate your harvest, they have stolen something other than your initial labour. Seen in this way, time is a resource that can be stolen. And anything that can be stolen can also be bought and sold.

In the case of non-renewable resources such as coal, this also also true. Again, coal is stored sunlight. It took time for nature to produce. By burning coal, humans are appropriating the value produced by natural processes that took thousands of years.

As an animist, I believe that the creative force of the universe is sacred, so I find it offensive to conceive of such value in such a depersonalized, mundane abstraction as Time.

But no one cares what I find offensive.

DOES VALUE COME FROM LABOUR?

If you ask me, the most interesting thing that Elon Musk has ever said is:

“Money, in my view, is essentially an information system for labor allocation, so it has no power in and of itself; it's like a database for guiding people as to what they should do.”

I’m no fan of Elon Musk, but I see nothing wrong with this definition. Perhaps it is incomplete, but it is the best single-sentence definition of money I am aware of.

Interestingly, it sounds oddly compatible with Marx’s labour theory of value, which isn’t something you would expect from “the world’s richest man”.

WHAT IS THE LABOUR THEORY OF VALUE?

To be fair, the labour theory of value is not Marx’s invention, though it is most often associated with him. It was actually first expressed by Adam Smith.

The basic idea is that the value of a good or service is determined by the amount of labor required to produce it. According to this theory, the more labor that goes into producing a good or service, the more valuable it is.

Is this were true, how do you explain NFTs selling for thousands of dollars? How do you explain the fact that this woman made thousands of dollars farting into jars and selling the jars to her Instagram followers?

For that matter, how do you why the art produced by one artist is worth more than that of another?

According to Townes Van Zandt, some of his songs came to him in dreams. He literally wrote better songs in his sleep than most professional musicians will ever write in their entire lives.

Don’t believe me? He wrote this song in his sleep:

Clearly, the value of a work of art does not depend on the time that it took to produce. Furthermore, if you ask me, the market doesn’t necessarily reward talent. There are many great artists whose talent was only recognized after they died.

The labour theory of value isn’t completely wrong - labour is a big part of what produces value. But the fact is that is not all labour is of equal value.

Life’s not fair, folks. Get used to it.

Would you rather live if a world where insanely talented people didn’t exist?

IS MARKET ANARCHISM NOW VIABLE?

I never gave anarcho-capitalism much thought before COVID.

For one, I just saw it as a U.S. thing. For another, I thought it was an obvious contradiction in terms, because the market does not regulate itself. It is manipulated by the state, which is in turn manipulated by the international banking cartel. This has been as true as long as any of us have been alive.

I shared the general Canadian attitude that “Free market economics” was just a propaganda construct invented by U.S. Republicans. In a world with extreme wealth inequality, market fundamentalism seemed delusional to me.

Furthermore, as an anarchist, I saw money as part of the problem. Money didn’t exist before states. Money and states go together like shit and stink.

MONEY IS A MEDIUM OF EXCHANGE, BUT NOT ARE MEDIA OF EXCHANGE ARE MONEY

“Wait a minute, Crow”, you might be thinking, “coins might not have existed before city-states, but coins and money are not the same thing. Many different cultures have used all kinds of things to facilitate trade.”

As one commenter put it: “Anything can be used as money - cowrie shells, tobacco, ammunition.”

When I asked that commenter to define money, he answered a “medium of exchange”.

This isn’t wrong, but it is incomplete. Money is one medium of exchange, but there are others.

In many prisons, cigarettes are used as a currency. Are cigarettes money?

During the fur trade, Hudson’s Bay blankets were used as a trade currency. Does that make blankets money?

Any number of things can be used to facilitate trade, but money is a specific type of medium of exchange.

Typically, what we call money is defined by the following qualities:

• Durability

• Portability

• Divisibility

• Uniformity

• Limited supply

• Acceptability

• Fungibility

I plan to gradually explore these characteristics in more detail, but for now I’ll stick to just one - Limited Supply.

ALL MEDIA OF EXCHANGE, NOT JUST MONEY, DEPEND ON LIMITED SUPPLY

In prisons, the value of cigarettes is a result of their scarcity. Contraband cigarettes must be smuggled into the prison, and we can be sure that demand would always exceed supply. In this case, the supply is limited by prison guards.

In the case of the blankets, the supply of those blankets was controlled by the Hudson’s Bay company. Indigenous fur traders did not produce such blankets, nor did voyageurs, missionaries, or anyone else. The supply of these blankets was controlled by the Hudson’s Bay company. There was always a reliable demand for these blankets because hello, Canada is cold. They had both use value and exchange value.

So how does this apply to money?

WHO LIMITS THE SUPPLY OF MONEY?

So, if money is defined by a limited supply, who limits the global supply of money?

There’s a simple answer to that question - the Bank of International Settlements. Ever heard of it?

I hadn’t until I came across this infographic, produced by the brilliant market anarchist Iain Davis.

So if you’re worrying about global bankers taking over the world, I’ve got news for you - they already did.

Ironically, the reality is exactly the opposite of what most people think - the Great Reset is a desperate attempt by the globalists to prepare for the collapse of their usurious global empire.

The B.I.S. sits atop the global monetary system, along with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. They have the ultimate authority over the global money supply. They can literally summon unlimited quantities of money into existence through the wave of a magic wand. And that’s what they’ve been doing since 2020. But at the end of the day, the whole system is a pyramid scheme, and it’s about to come crashing down. And that’s a good thing.

As for CBDCs, guess what? The currencies of every country have digital for decades, and guess who issues them? Central banks.

CBDCs are what we’ve had for ages. You might as well be outraged about car insurance.

As for social credit, that’s what existed before money.

As usual, things are upside-down and backwards. Social credit is a good thing.

HAIL TO THEE, GREAT SATOSHI, SLAYER OF CBDCs! MIGHT THY NAME BE PRAISED WAY LONGER THAN THAT OF OZYMANDIAS!

Before the invention of Bitcoin, there was no way to limit the supply of money without a gang of goons. Now there is. Does that mean that it’s all sunshines and rainbows from here on in? No, it doesn’t. People are still people, and

Bitcoin doesn’t solve every problem in the world, but if adopted, it would solve the biggest one - the fact that the world is ruled by psychopathic usurers who are evil as fuck.

I’m still an anti-industrialist, but I think that green anarchists would be well-advised to start taking market anarchists more seriously.

Now that it is possible to have digital money that is not controlled by any state, market anarchism makes way more sense.

Also, there are a lot of capitalists who are questioning fundamental assumptions about society that they used to take for granted.

Thanks to Bitcoiners, most intelligent people now understand that money is an imaginary social construct that has power over us because we believe in it.

What they don’t seem to realize is that people believe in it because it is backed up by state violence and the threat of violence.

Reality is what doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it. If you’re ever been poor, you know that the power of money is plenty real. But it is ultimately a social construct; a fiction; a game that we all go along with, if only for lack of better options.

Well, guess what? Now there is a better option. It’s called Bitcoin.

I hear a lot of people asking “What is Money?” these days, but this question quickly leads to much more interesting ones, such as “What is Value?”, “What is Desire?” or “What do we ultimately want?”

Once people start asking the right questions, they will ultimately realize that government truly is mind control. Once they do, they will realize that anarchists have been right all. along.

At last, they will be ready to receive the gospel of Juggalo Theocracy!